Decision-to-Action Tracker

What this tool does

CM8-364 records what meetings decided and whether anything came of it. Each decision carries the actions it created; each action points back at its decision. The tool then answers the question minutes never do: which decisions actually turned into something?

Everything runs inside this single file — no account, no upload, no network request of any kind.

Why decisions and actions belong together

Most organisations keep an action list and, separately, minutes. The action list gets worked; the minutes get filed. What nobody has is the link — and the link is where the failure lives.

A decision with no action attached is not a decision. It is a conversation that ended agreeably. It will be raised again in three months by somebody who was in the room and remembers it differently, and the meeting will decide the same thing again.

Holding both in one register makes that visible, and it is usually the most uncomfortable output of this tool.

What one row is

One row is one decision, one action, or one thing noted for information. Actions name the decision they arise from; decisions name nothing above them.

The tool enforces three rules, all of which sound pedantic and none of which is:

• An action must arise from a decision. If there is no decision, either write the decision down or accept that somebody has simply been given a task.
• An action must have an owner. An action owned by a team is owned by nobody, and the tool will not save one.
• A decision cannot arise from another decision. That is a chain of reasoning, not a hierarchy — record it in the detail.

Record decisions to do nothing, too. "Review the dividend policy at the year end rather than now" is a real decision, and writing it down is what stops it being reopened next month. The sample has one.

The chain, and what breaks it

The first table prints each decision with its actions indented underneath, which is the view worth taking into a meeting. Two things break the chain and both are shown rather than hidden:

• An action whose decision reference does not exist in the register, printed at the foot marked !!.
• A decision with no actions at all, flagged in its own row.

Decisions that led nowhere

A decision with no action against it after the stale threshold is marked decided, nothing happened. This is the headline finding of most registers the first time they are reviewed.

Three things usually cause it, and they need different responses: nobody in the room owned the work; the decision was really an opinion; or the action existed but was never written down, in which case it is running on somebody's memory and will surface as a surprise.

Actions with no decision

The reverse fault, and more common than it looks: work is being done that nobody agreed to. Sometimes that is fine — somebody spotted something and got on with it. Sometimes it means a meeting nobody recorded is generating commitments, which is worth knowing about before the invoice arrives.

Days to close

Counted from the meeting, not from the due date, and open items count to today. That is deliberate: measuring from the due date lets an action be re-dated repeatedly and still look punctual, which is exactly the behaviour this register exists to catch.

The target applies where no due date was set. An action with no due date is flagged, because "as soon as possible" has never once been a date.

Carrying forward

Increment the carried count each time an action appears on an agenda without moving. Past the limit you set, the tool flags it.

An action carried four times is not going to be done. It is too big, too vague, blocked by something nobody has named, or the wrong person owns it. The useful response is to re-scope it into something that can be finished in a fortnight, or drop it honestly — and dropping it is a legitimate outcome that the cancelled status exists for.

Pricing the meeting time

Record the meeting length and headcount once per meeting, on the first row for it. The tile then shows the share of meeting cost whose decisions produced no action.

It is a blunt figure and it is meant to be. A recurring meeting costing four hundred a session and producing decisions that half the time lead to nothing is not a communication problem — it is a standing expense with a measurable return.

Writing an action that gets done

The register makes follow-through visible; it cannot make an action doable. Four things separate actions that close from actions that get carried:

• A verb and an object. "Obtain a written volume commitment from the customer" closes. "Look at the customer situation" does not.
• One person. Not two, not a department.
• A date somebody agreed to in the room, out loud, rather than one assigned to them afterwards.
• Small enough to finish. If it cannot be done in the gap before the next meeting, it is a project and needs a plan rather than a line on an action list.

What this cannot tell you

• Whether the decision was any good. A register full of promptly delivered bad decisions looks excellent here.
• Whether the action delivered what the decision intended. Closed means somebody marked it done.
• Whether the decision was within anybody's authority to make.
• What was decided in the corridor afterwards, which in some organisations is most of it.

Printing and sharing

The Report tab prints the tiles, charts and both tables with a title block you fill in. Filter to one forum before printing to produce that meeting's own pack; the chain table is the agenda and the worklist is the first item on it.

Saving your work

The register is held in this browser, on this computer, and stays there between visits. Use the backup button to write a JSON file you control; the spreadsheet download gives you the same rows to circulate.

Accuracy & disclaimer

Everything here is what somebody typed in. The tool counts, links and dates; it has no view about whether a decision was recorded faithfully, and a register is only as honest as the person keeping it.